‘The Sunday Philosophy Club’ by Alexander McCall Smith and ‘Suite Francaise’ by Irene Nemirovsky.
Truly some books can be read simply for pleasure while others offer a more profound experience. For pleasure I picked up ‘The Sunday Philosophy Club’ by Alexander McCall Smith (the author famed for the No. 1 One Ladies’ Detective Agency series).
On the first page we meet Isabel Dalhousie and are introduced to her leisured Edinburgh life. She regularly breaks off from her morning’s work to have coffee with her niece at the local delicatessen, where together they talk through the latest developments in a mystery that Isabel is intent upon solving. Intriguingly the plot leaves many loose ends (like life itself!) but I was captivated more by the setting, complete with the housekeeper who relieves our heroine of domestic chores. As editor of ‘The Review of Applied Ethics’, Isabel publishes scholarly articles on moral dilemmas and endeavours to apply ethical principles to her own life. It made me wonder how often is one confronted with the need to make an ethical decision? Is it avoided, or just that issues do not present themselves in those terms? How far can the slow reasoning of the head hold sway over ingrained habits of behaviour or be a match for the speed of the desires of the heart? And where are we if the heart does not inform the head? What is the nature of the conscience that we are told is deeply embedded within the psyche?
Such questions take one beyond light reading but have engaged the author, Irene Nemirovsky. In her two volume novel, Suite Francaise, written under the pressure of the German invasion of France in 1940, real moral dilemmas present themselves to her characters though they often cannot face them. She shows the way in which self-interest takes over when the structure of ordinary life collapses and I experienced a sense of recognition – aware that I myself might react in that way. For instance, writing of an upper middle class matron, formerly pleased with her munificence, the author observes, “Christian charity, the compassion of centuries of civilisation fell from her like useless ornaments, revealing her bare, arid soul. She needed to feed and protect her own children. Nothing else mattered any more.”
The unfolding drama, often humorously observed, is played out against the backdrop of beautiful summer days in which the abundance of Nature contrasts sharply with the wanton destruction of human warfare but at a key moment in the narration there is a vivid description of the stealth of a cat catching a bird and it's cruelty. What exactly is “natural’?
In describing the hardships of the populace fleeing from Paris, the self pity and anguish of some characters is contrasted with one who is sufficiently lucid and detached to reflect that, “These great human migrations seem to follow natural laws.” He experiences what it is to be caught up in something much greater than the personal self.
The second volume of the novel deals with the years of occupation and collaboration. The author was drawing on events as they unfolded around her, while she and her daughters were evacuated to a small French village (how very different from today was rural life at that time…) Then as she had feared, in 1942, Irene Nemirovsky was arrested by gendarmes on account of her Ukrainian Jewish ancestry. She was deported to Auschwitz where within a month she died of typhoid. One can read the story of how her novel has only recently come to light and its reception in France in the Guardian Review (www.guardian.co.uk/france/story).
Her work evokes in me a state of wonder at the quality of heart and mind, one could also say of soul (a term which she herself uses with confidence) revealed in her writing; and at her ability to enter into the lives of a wide and varied cast of characters with such accuracy and discrimination. This is a novel well worth re-reading and I am now tacklng it in French. It is the prerogative of authors one might call ‘great’ as it is of playwrights like Ibsen and Chekov, to activate the conscience in their audience.